Ways to scale your business 📈

In Episode 3 of Season 2, Morgan invited Chloé Martinot, Co-Founder of Mesetys, to go #BehindtheProduct. Mesetys is a platform that supports architects and interior designers by lightening their mental load, through aggregating all of their data and conversations with clients, and automate tasks such as generating alternative floorplans.

In the episode, Chloé explained how her and her co-founder hit a ceiling in scaling their interior design agency, only being able to take up to 10 client projects at a time with the both of them. They decided to look at what was keeping them from scaling, areas where technology should be utilized, and built a product that can help boost any interior design agency - solving issues for them and others..

Scaling a product/business means being able to grow it steadily to boost and sustain growth over a certain period of time. Any product/business is scalable if it can/should be able to handle an increase in demand from users, without having to break the bank to accommodate that demand. 

First, how do you know when it’s time to scale?

• When your business is established, with a stable cash flow
• You think some processes are holding you back and can be improved
• You feel your business is going too “steady” (time to bring some noise back in!)

So what ways can you do to scale your business?

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📲 Expand your business model

Once you’ve established your business by offering successful products (or services!), you can start to think about offering new ways to better solve your user’s pain points or better deliver what they want.

Think about how else your business can do that - is it to add a new line for a more specific or larger group of users? Is it increasing pricing models to reflect the value you provide? Is it hitting a new market to go international?

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💻 Automate what can be automated

This is how Chloé could scale her interior design agency, by automating what can be automated with technology and a product they built. This is usually an overlooked part of scaling businesses, because most would just need to simply improve their workflows, operations and processes to be able to take in more business. How do you think technology can help you out? This will greatly save you time and provide more bandwidth to think about other opportunities to capture.

Don’t forget to also document tasks in the business, and gradually build quick “How-To’s” or in-depth knowledge libraries to help new hires get onboarded quicker and more effectively.

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🕺🏼 Hire amazing talent

You couldn’t build a business without a team. And you definitely can’t scale one without an amazing team. As your users grow, you’ll need more or better employees to better serve them. Look at talent that will compliment the rest of your team’s, or ones that are capable to do even more - as you scale, so should your team’s skillsets.

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👯 Invest in relationships, powerful partnerships

You don’t need to do all the heavy-lifting of scaling when you can collaborate with another business or partner that will help both of you score more users! And in terms of partnership, the sky is the limit to how creative you can be. In the end, partnering should be a win-win, whether it’s leveraging each other’s reach or recreating a product that showcases both of your product’s strengths to better solve user’s pain points.

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🦾Grow your brand reach online

If you aren’t already, make sure to be leveraging platforms like social media and your own online communities to constantly be on top of mind = grow your brand awareness and reach to gain more users. 

But to grow it even further, you’ll also have to be creative on ways you can do it - maybe engaging in a Reddit forum where most of your target audiences hang, reaching out to popular newsletter publications that would love to feature what you do, or creating a competition to grow shares and user-generated content. Make sure to also keep track of analytics for each, to know where you can put more fire-power in or where to stop unsuccessful initiatives. 

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👀 Look at your competitors

Have successful competitors with a large user base and reach? Great, they’ve already blazed the trail to ways you can also capture more opportunities to scale.

Have an audit of your competitors and different initiatives they’re taking on to further grow their business. Did they launch a new product everyone’s talking about? What product is this, what features have made it successful, how did they build hype around launching, which channels did they leverage, what materials did they use?

There are many ways to scale your business, and you can be as creative as you can be with it too! You just need to make sure that your business is ready to handle more demand, have made all complex processes simple to scale easier, and that it won’t drown you and your team.

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💥 Bonus:

Chloé’s top tips for entrepreneurs

❤️ Love the problem, not the solution. Focusing on the solution can make you forget what actually matters.
🌱 Trust the process. Everyone wants success overnight, but you don’t scream at a seedling to grow -  same goes for businesses. Invest in the right actions.
💬 See feedback as a gift. Your richest source of helpful feedback will come from criticism.

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🎧 Listen now on your favourite podcast channels

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